Film Road to Halloween: Joker (2019)

The road to Halloween is paved with good films. Wherein we countdown to the spirited season with a hundred doses of horror. 26 days to go.

It’s been almost a month since I saw Joker at the Toronto International Film Festival, so I’m confident that what I’m about to say is not the product of the in-the-moment hyperbole that is endemic to the Twitter frenzy everyone races to participate in following a major festival premiere. I open with this caveat because I’m admittedly as guilty of that as anyone, and I’ve deliberately waited to write a full piece on Joker until I knew my thoughts had settled. They have, so let’s send in the goddamn clowns.

I hated Joker more than any film I’ve ever seen, and I don’t even think there’s a close competitor.

Before I expand on that, let’s get something out of the way—I am anti-censorship. I’m not trying to convince anyone not to see Joker, nor do I think convincing people not to see things is the role of film criticism. Frankly, I’m a little uncomfortable with the idea of someone deciding not to see a movie based on what I’ve written about it. But Joker is and will continue to take up a lot of oxygen in the cultural zeitgeist, and what the movie is saying—both intentionally and unintentionally—merits serious discussion.

So if you wanted to see Joker prior to reading this, then you should absolutely go see Joker, and you can develop your own opinions on the movie. But here are mine.

Joker felt no different to me than the worst kind of grievance-for-profit Fox News segments. It attempts to seize on a collective white male no-one-wants-to-fuck-me resentment, weaponize it in the name of a mega-corporation’s bottom line, and give absolutely zero shits about the collateral damage it inflicts on its audience’s views about the world.

There have been countless movies—many of them great—about bad people. But those movies, or at least the good ones, always present a sort of relative morality. The Corleone family in The Godfather is bad, but they are juxtaposed against Sollozzo and McCluskey, who are worse. In Joker, there is no such positioning. There is no relative “better” to anything that is ever portrayed. No inherent goodness, and no right actions, are ever put on screen, which enables the film to effectively manipulate us into seeing the Joker as those right actions.

I’ve (regretfully) spent the last few weeks participating in the Joker discourse that’s playing out on Twitter, and I’ve noticed three main counter-arguments to the things I’ve said. (These arguments were almost exclusively used by people that hadn’t actually seen the film yet, but whatever.) There’s a lot to unpack with these responses, so let’s do so.

Counter Argument #1: “It’s only a movie.”

First of all, there’s at least a 40% chance that anyone saying this to you on Twitter has also made their own YouTube video about how lady Ghostbusters ruined their childhood, so engage with these takes at your own peril. But my dudes, it’s 2019, and nothing is only what it is on the surface. Tacit messages of values and ethics are coded into everything, often overtly, and Joker is about as overt on this as it gets.

As has been proven over and over again by cable news, Facebook, and Russian interference into elections, most people are very easily swayed by visual messaging (or outright propaganda). Advertising is a massive global industry because manipulating people is shockingly easy and effective. Widespread opinions change all the time, in mass numbers, based on media representations. If we buy into the now-commonly-held belief that Will & Grace helped normalize LGBT acceptance among many straight TV viewers, then there’s no reason to believe that a movie like Joker—which will be watched and rewatched by a massive number of young-ish people—has zero capacity to wield the same power.

Counter Argument #2: “Joker was a lot more evil in The Dark Knight.”

Yes, he was, but Joker was also the antagonist of The Dark Knight. Nearly every action of the Joker in The Dark Knight was an attempt to get people to succumb to their worst tendencies, but what frequently happens is that the people refuse to sink that low. Think about the climactic sequence where Joker has planted bombs on two packed ferries, and he’s given each ferry the detonator to blow up the other. It’s tense for a while, but eventually no one on either ferry could bring themselves to do it. The Dark Knight is ultimately a deeply moralistic film about the failure of the Joker to sway others to his nihilism.

In Joker, on the other hand, his ultimate success in swaying others to believe, celebrate, and participate in his own nihilism is the whole point. This should be obvious by the title, but Joker is the clear protagonist of his own film. The chief struggle in Joker is for poor Arthur Fleck to find love and connection.

That he eventually finds it by putting on clown makeup and going on a murder spree is presented as, though not necessarily the best idea, at least a viable and pseudo-rationalized one. Some people find their crowd through sports, some through hobbies, and some online. In Joker, Arthur finds his crowd by killing people. But it’s okay, because now he is loved. He has connected. You gotta do what you gotta do, the film seems to suggest.

Counter Argument #3: “If you didn’t hate Taxi Driver for the same reason, then how can you hate Joker?”

NOTE: The rest of this will get into spoiler territory about how Joker ends, so proceed at your own risk. Or come back and read after you’ve seen the film.

Joker openly evokes and emulates two classic Scorsese films, Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, so it’s worth comparing how the protagonists are presented between them. Both Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy ask us to understand their characters, but the movies do not celebrate them. There is no point in either film where Travis Bickle or Rupert Pupkin are presented as heroic, except in the final sequence of Taxi Driver, which is widely interpreted to be a delusion in Bickle’s mind as he bleeds to death. (Spoiler alert for a movie from 43 years ago.)

Joker, on the other hand, is 100% celebrated in the film. The movie ends with a huge mob of people in clown masks elevating Joker as their messiah, worthy of idol worship as the city around them is on literal fire. Every insane thing Joker does in the movie is presented as a justifiable action given what the character has gone through, and he is ultimately celebrated and rewarded for his evil. There is no comeuppance, only a pure, fetishistic romanticization of chaos for chaos’ sake.

I don’t believe any creator or creation is responsible for the obviously wrong interpretations people take away from them, but they are responsible for correct or clearly implied interpretations. That’s why Bernie Sanders isn’t responsible for the shooting of Steve Scalise, but Donald Trump is absolutely responsible for the mass shooting in the El Paso Wal-Mart.

The original message matters, and Joker has a disgusting message. It’s a film that says nothing matters, morality doesn’t matter, and if you’re feeling personally shit upon, lashing out in the most vile, nihilistic ways will ultimately be celebrated and rewarded, as long as you do it with grand theatricality. I’m not worried about audiences misinterpreting that; I’m worried about them taking it at face value.

Again, I’m not advocating for censorship, and if you want to see Joker you should see it. But I am worried about what this film will provoke in some of its audience. Remember, as a character, Joker is a revered cultural icon. The Joker has legions of massive fans, and is an immensely popular cosplay character.

And without getting too stereotypical about nerd culture, toxic fandom, and incels, many of those fans will leave this movie having seen a representation of their favorite character on screen that looks eerily like what they feel and experience on a daily basis. And they will have seen how that character deals with it, and how he gets openly worshipped for those actions. That is a profoundly bad set of ideas and visuals to put in the minds of some of these people.

I can’t think of another case where a film about a revered cultural character will have a significant portion of its audience leaving the theater knowing they could personally do everything they just saw happen on screen. But this one will.